Naturalist helped bridge two worlds

She also found that chimps hunted prey, ate meat and were capable of a range of emotions and behaviors similar to those of humans, including filial love, grief and violence bordering on warfare.

- Woo is a former Times staff writer.

Jane Goodall with Bahati, a 3-year-old female chimpanzee, at the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary, north of Nairobi, in 1997.

(JEAN-MARC BOUJU Associated Press)

In the course of establishing one of the world’s longest-running studies of wild animal behavior at what is now Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, she gave her chimp subjects names instead of numbers, a practice that raised eyebrows in the male-dominated field of primate studies in the 1960s.

But within a decade, the trim British scientist with the tidy ponytail was a National Geographic heroine, whose books and films educated a worldwide audience with stories of the apes she called David Graybeard, Mr. McGregor, Gilka and Flo.

“When we read about a woman who gives funny names to chimpanzees and then follows them into the bush, meticulously recording their every grunt and groom, we are reluctant to admit such activity into the big leagues,” the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote of the scientific world’s initial reaction to Goodall.

But Goodall overcame her critics and produced work that Gould later characterized as “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”

Tenacious and keenly observant, Goodall paved the way for other women in primatology, including the late gorilla researcher Dian Fossey and orangutan expert Birute Galdikas. She was honored in 1995 with the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, which then had been bestowed only 31 times in the previous 90 years to such eminent figures as North Pole explorer Robert E. Peary and aviator Charles Lindbergh.

In her 80s she continued to travel 300 days a year to speak to schoolchildren and others about the need to fight deforestation, preserve chimpanzees’ natural habitat and promote sustainable development in Africa. She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the U.S. at the time of her death.